Fear of What We Don't Know

"Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common.

Celebrate it every day."

My response to the anti-Muslim email has drawn out a response from someone else on the mailing list. Here is what this person, who I do not know, sent me:

It's pretty clever of you to send your response to people receiving "London". Now, how about being clever enough to figure out the only fear mongering in this email is coming from those depicted in the pictures. These pictures show an observation of what is happening in our allied country and throughout Europe. To ignore these pictures would be foolish. See, this is part of the problem, muslims are not assimilating to the cultures the move into. It's fine that they keep their religion (providing it is not aggressive to the religious culture they migrate to), the west and U.S. have been more than accomodating to their religious practice. But, if we allow them to move in and push out our culture as they are practicing in Europe, then that puts our values and way of life in jepordy. Just look at England, they are a few short years away from adopting Sharia Law in their laws as stated last year by England's Lord Judge. But you don't want us to observe and question the images we see in these pictures? Maybe your friend should have asked her persian friend if she was now an American or still iranian (assuming this incident occured in the U.S.). God speed. EMG

This was my response:

My first questions to you EMG are "Do you have any Muslim friends?" and "Have you ever spent time with a Muslim?" It is so much easier to be afraid of what we don't know and don't understand.

Visit Snopes (urban legends to read the full story on that email and the photos.) Yes, those are real photos and yes it is extremely disturbing to see anyone promote violent actions and hate as those individuals were doing in those photos. I used the word "individuals" intentionally. Do those individuals represent ALL Muslims? Do you have the audacity to say that these individuals are representative of all Muslims? How could you if you don't really know any Muslims personally? In the Snopes response it includes a statement that "Other Muslims maintained that the protesters were extremists not representative of mainstream British Muslims."

I don't really believe that England is going to adopt Sharia law. There was a controversial suggestion made by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who happens to be a Christian, about adopting Sharia Law. There has been much public opinion against his statement. Even the Muslim Council of Britain insisted that most members of the community did not want Sharia and emphasized that it had not discussed the issue. Click here for the article I am referring to if you want to read it yourself.

Lastly I want to respond to your comment about asking the woman if she was American or still Iranian. The truth is that she could be both. You can't erase the woman's heritage, her genes, her culture from her completely. Should we ever ask anyone to reject the culture they were born into? Our country has an extremely long history of melding cultures. Does the diversity in our country sometimes pose challenges - certainly it does. Yet I believe we are also a better nation because of the diversity.